


Flowers In Your Hair

by ennta



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Bioluminescence, Fluff, Hair Braiding, M/M, SO MUCH FLUFF, Sleepy Picnic Makeouts, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-10
Updated: 2013-11-10
Packaged: 2018-01-01 01:45:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1038865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ennta/pseuds/ennta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Night Vale may be strange and terrifying, but Carlos is learning to find beauty in what he doesn't understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flowers In Your Hair

**Author's Note:**

> This is a gift fic for [goddess-in-green](http://goddess-in-green.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr, because she's gifted the fandom with so much lovely artwork. Fic is based on [this adorable piece](http://goddess-in-green.tumblr.com/post/65498369266/carlos-learned-more-than-just-how-to-braid-hair), with cues taken from [this](http://goddess-in-green.tumblr.com/post/65855602688/why-is-that-flower-glowing-its-infused-with).
> 
> Title is from The Lumineers' song of the same name.

 

 

**~**

Night Vale holds terrible secrets, dark little wormholes to worlds that should not exist; the town has teeth, sharp fangs that are both far less and far more than human. To live in Night Vale is to live at the top of a roller coaster, waiting for the drop; to exist in Night Vale is to exist in the shards of color inside a kaleidoscope, to fruitlessly refocus over and over in the hope that one day all those shattered realities of color will coalesce.

Then there are days when everything sort of makes sense, when Cecil shows up at Carlos’s lab with a picnic basket and a checkered blanket and only one shadow that doesn’t seem to be actively trying to escape. Days like this, Carlos admits to himself, keep him in Night Vale, remind him that small wonders can coexist with terrifying quirks of the supernatural on the same plane.

So he sits with Cecil in Mission Grove Park, the blanket spread beneath them, the sandwiches and wine both gone. Cecil’s head is resting in Carlos’s lap, his eyes closed, his face settled in an expression of absolute contentment. The sun slips down towards the horizon, the deep violets and violent golds of sunset merging with the strange lights above the Arby’s to create lazy abstract artwork against the canvas of a coming night. Flowers sprout like fireflies around the park, a patch cropping up near one corner of the picnic blanket, and Carlos suspends his scientific curiosity long enough to appreciate the way the petals sway in a warm desert wind, graceful and bioluminescent.

The wine has settled with a sweet, heavy warmth in Carlos’s stomach, and he carefully dusts his fingertips over Cecil’s closed eyelids. Cecil’s smile is soft and slow and sleepy, and he reaches up behind him to wrap an arm around Carlos’s waist. His fingers stroke absently at the small of Carlos’s back, then slow and fall slack as Cecil drifts off.

Carlos is not a sentimental man, not a romantic man, but he thinks it is impossible to avoid the rush of muted adoration he feels for Cecil in this lengthening dusk. Night Vale is full of horrors, and Night Vale has teeth, and no one knows this better than Cecil--and yet here he is, defenseless and limp and comfortingly alive in Carlos’s lap, his long black hair with its unnatural streaks of pure white fanning over his shoulders and Carlos’s thighs.

Carlos reaches down to run his hands through Cecil’s hair, amused, as always, by the fact that Cecil thinks _Carlos_ is the one with hair worthy of worship. Cecil’s hair is thick and soft and smells like the lilac shampoo he loves so much, and Carlos’s fingers are parting the strands to plait them before he really thinks about what he is doing. It reminds him of braiding his sisters' hair, reminds him of childhood and family and ... well.  _Home_. 

Cecil shifts a little, murmurs happily at Carlos’s touch, and his lips quirk upwards just enough that Carlos knows the other man is not quite asleep but not quite awake. Keeping one hand in the hair he is braiding, Carlos ghosts his fingers over that little smile, memorizing the shape of Cecil’s mouth underneath his touch.

It occurs to Carlos then, as the wine settles a bit further, that those glowing flowers--well, they _are_  quite lovely, and they don't seem dangerous, and Carlos carefully picks one with his free hand and winds the stem into the braid he is still working on. The flower doesn’t lose its glow upon being uprooted, and Carlos decides he likes the way it looks, plucks a few more of the strange plants and continues to braid. The slip and twist of Cecil’s hair in his hands and through his fingers is far more appealing than Carlos would have imagined, and he makes a mental note to do this more often.

When he has finished twining Cecil’s hair into two more or less symmetrical braids, he slides his hands over Cecil’s shoulders, resting one just over the sleeping man’s heart, running the other down one arm. He leans over to study the way the firefly flowers shine against Cecil’s dark skin, and when Cecil’s eyes open, there is a depth to them, a heavy fondness to their strange violet glint.

Cecil pushes himself to a sitting position, turns to face Carlos, and Carlos can’t breathe for a long moment, because Cecil seems to be glowing, his braids swinging over his shoulders, the flowers in them growing brighter with the broad sweep of Cecil’s white, even smile. The lights are a brilliant complementary contrast to Cecil’s brown skin and lavender tunic, and he seems ethereal, an extension of the sunset and the strange lights in the sky.

When Cecil leans forward and takes Carlos’s face in his hands, pulls him in for a kiss, Carlos catches a scent like honey mixed with jasmine twined with lilac, and the kiss is as soft as the twilight enveloping them. Cecil pulls back just enough to catch Carlos’s lower lip between his own lips, pauses to breathe against Carlos’s skin, then presses forward and takes Carlos’s mouth in a hungry, slow twist of tongues.

Carlos moans into the kiss and pulls Cecil over on top of him, and in the moment before he closes his eyes and gives himself over, the world is nothing but sunset-stained clouds shining in a darkening sky, visible over Cecil’s shoulders, and the petals of bright flowers shining in dark hair. The world is nothing but light and warmth and humid breaths shared between a hopeless romantic and a skeptic with nothing to believe in and everything to lose.

If existing in Night Vale is to exist in a kaleidoscope of horrors, Cecil is the stained glass window that all of the strange colors and patterns shift into, and Carlos thinks he will be able to exist, to live, to thrive, if he can spend the rest of his life viewing the world through that window.

 

**~**

**Author's Note:**

> Want to flail over Night Vale with me in other online venues? Meet up with me on Tumblr, where I go by [in-static-pallor](http://in-static-pallor.tumblr.com/).


End file.
